The Firefly Cafe (Billionaire Brothers, #1)(21)

“Stop that,” she said sharply, getting to her feet and hugging her arms tightly around her rib cage. “You don’t get to make me feel sorry for you. This is hard enough already.”

Dylan blinked. “I wasn’t trying to—but okay. Fine. Look, Penny, I’ll make this right however you want. Just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.”

Lifting her chin, a challenge glinted in Penny’s hazel eyes. “I have to go to my shift at the café now. I want you out of this house before I get home. And if you ever come back to Sanctuary Island, I swear I’ll quit this job, because I never want to see you again.”





Chapter 11



“What are you doing?”

The tense young voice jolted Dylan from his mechanical stuffing of dirty work clothes into his duffel bag.

Matt stood in the doorway of the guest room, arms crossed tightly over his wiry chest and looking so much like his mother that Dylan went light-headed for a humiliating instant.

He turned back to his packing and hoped Matt didn’t notice the way his hands shook. “I’m leaving.”

“Why?”

Dylan pinched his eyes shut, hanging his head over the bag sitting on his bed. “No one told you.”

“That your name is Dylan Harrington and you’re related to the people who pay us to live in this house? Yeah, I know all that. I heard everything that went on downstairs.” Matt marched into the room and grabbed Dylan’s shoulder, jerking him around until they were face-to-face.

“What I don’t know,” Matt continued, thrusting his chin out pugnaciously, “is why you’re running out on us like … like a coward.”

The kid was trembling with the force of emotions too strong for someone so young to have to handle, and it hurt Dylan to see it. “Matthew. I lied to you and your mother. She doesn’t want me around anymore, and you can’t blame her.”

Matt made a frustrated noise, his dark blond brows like thunder. “I don’t blame her. I blame you, for not getting it.”

It was as if his rib cage had grown rows of lethally sharp spikes. Every breath hurt. “She told me she never wants to see me again. She was very clear. One strike and I’m out. What, Matt? Tell me what I’m missing.”

Sending him a pitying look, Matt shook his head. “It’s totally obvious. Don’t you see it? Everyone leaves. She doesn’t want you to go. So she’s testing you, to see if you’ll fight to stay. And you’re about to flunk, man.”

With that, Matt stalked out of the room and down the hall to slam his own door shut, leaving Dylan alone and staggering with his thoughts.

What if Matt was right? What if Dylan hadn’t completely blown all his chances with Penny—but was about to, by skulking off the island with his tail tucked between his legs?

The rough terrain of Dylan’s heart was too rocky to support a tendril of hope, but even in the midst of his overwhelming certainty that Penny would never deviate from her No Second Chances policy to forgive him, there was still a spark of desire to make sure she understood why he’d lied. But was that an entirely selfish impulse to salve his conscience, and nothing more?

He needed a ruling on this. Staring down at his hands wringing the thin cotton of the white T-shirt that still sported a faint brown iced tea stain from that very first day, Dylan set his jaw.


His brothers were never there for him when he was a kid. Logan could damn well offer up some advice now.

He strode down the path whose creamy smooth paving stones he’d placed himself, and rapped on the door of the cottage at the back of the garden. Within seconds, Jessica Bell appeared on the front porch, with a forbidding expression on her perfectly made-up face.

“Keep it down! If you wake him up—”

From inside the cottage, a ragged voice rumbled. “Who’s at the door, Tink?”

Without taking her accusing glare off of Dylan’s face, she called, “I’m handling it. Go back to sleep.”

Dylan let himself into the screened-in porch, since Jessica was just standing there scowling at him. “Tink, huh?”

It was only meant to be something to say, a quick tease to get her to smile instead of frown, but instead, she blushed. Fascinated, Dylan tracked the progress of the red flush through her pearly redhead’s complexion.

“That’s Jessica to you,” she said severely. “Miss Bell if you’re nasty.”

“What does Tink even mean?” Dylan had to ask.

“Tink. Tinkerbell? Hi, nice to meet you, I’m Jessica Bell, personal assistant to the modern incarnation of Peter Pan.” Rolling her eyes, she sauntered over to fold her long limbs onto the floral-patterned glider. “Never mind. You’re here for romantic advice, right? I’ll be better at that than your brother, anyway. Once I get over laughing myself sick at the idea of a Harrington doing manual labor.”

Taken aback for a moment at how quickly Jessica seemed to have put the pieces together, Dylan decided beggars couldn’t be choosers. Jessica wasn’t family, but she knew the Harringtons better than most—her advice would have to do.

The whole story poured out of him as he paced the cozy confines of the little porch whose screens he’d patched himself. In the garden, bees meandered from hydrangea to rosebush, and the summer heat was like a humid blanket over the world.